Sauce

In Mexico, salsas are typically made with ingredients roasted on a clay comal, or griddle. A cast-iron skillet is a good substitute. When whole chile peppers, unpeeled garlic cloves, tomatoes, and tomatillos are dry-roasted, they brown as they cook and develop the toasty overtones that create deep flavors in the salsa. Another traditional tool is the molcajete y tejolote, a rough stone mortar and pestle used to mash and blend the salsa.

A simple uncooked sauce of fresh herbs brings aliveness to the table. Salsa verde (green sauce) is a versatile sauce of parsley and olive oil flavored with shallots, capers, and lemon zest. The basic recipe can be enhanced with additional ingredients to make it more pungent and complex. It will brighten and complement many dishes, especially grilled vegetables, meat, and fish.

Serve warm caramel sauce with ice cream or stir it (at room temperature) into just-made ice cream before putting it in the freezer to firm up. It is lovely drizzled over poached pears.

This can be used only as a fresh sauce for pasta, but also as an element in many different dishes. When tomatoes are abundant, this is a good sauce to make in quantity and freeze or can. If you are going to pass the sauce through a food mill, there’s no need to peel and seed the tomatoes beforehand. The food mill will strain out all the skins and seeds.

This recipe is only for tomatoes that are at their absolute peak: dead ripe and full of flavor.

Bucatini is the classic pasta for this sauce.

This is the sauce you need to make pasta alla puttanesca, a specialty of Naples.

This salsa is so easy to make and tastes so much better than anything you can buy in a jar! Use fresh ripe tomatoes in the summer and canned whole tomatoes the rest of the year.

Bagna cauda means “warm bath” in an Italian dialect. Don’t let the anchovies steer you away. The strong flavors of garlic and anchovy are suspended in perfect balance in warm butter and olive oil. It is a delightful dipping sauce for raw vegetables, and it makes a tasty sauce for grilled vegetables and grilled or baked fish.

Béarnaise is a luxurious sauce flavored with shallots and tarragon, which give it a tart edge. It elevates a grilled steak or roast beef from delicious to divine.

Pesto is my favorite sauce to make. I love the sensory experience of pounding it and smelling it and tasting it as I go. Pesto is more than a pasta sauce: it’s delicious on sliced tomatoes, as a dipping sauce for vegetables, on a pizza, or as a sauce for grilled chicken and vegetables.

This is the basic white sauce used in lasagna, vegetable gratins, and savory soufflés.

This is best made from a variety of bones: knuckles add body from cartilage and tendons, shanks, and neck bones add meaty flavor (the meat from shanks can be cut off and used as the meat to brown). Don’t skimp on either meat or bones. They both add specific flavors and qualities that the sauce needs.

This sauce is time-consuming to make, so consider doubling the recipe. It’s especially good with hand-cut fresh egg noodles (see page 89) or in lasagna (see page 270).

Pan gravy is classically made with the drippings of a roast. This method applies to any number of roasted meats: beef, lamb, pork, chicken, turkey. It’s easiest to make the gravy right in the pan that the meat was roasted in.

Serve this sauce with breaded fried sole or oysters.

Velvety, luscious, garlicky mayonnaise—what the French call aïoli (pronounced eye-oh-lee)—is another sauce I use all the time: on sandwiches; with vegetables, both raw and cooked; with meat and fish; as the binder for chicken salad and egg salad; and as a base for sauces such as tartar sauce. Most children, even very young ones, love aïoli and will happily use it as a dip for bite after bite of bread, carrots, potatoes, and even vegetables they might otherwise refuse. Two or three small cloves of garlic per egg yolk, pounded with a mortar and pestle, make a fairly pungent garlic mayonnaise—depending on the garlic. The strength of garlic’s flavor can vary a lot, depending on freshness, season, and variety. I always pound the garlic in a mortar and pestle and reserve half of it, so I can add it later if the aïoli needs it. (You can always add more garlic, but you can’t subtract it.) It’s important to pound the garlic to a very smooth purée so the sauce will be garlicky through and through, not just a mayonnaise with bits of garlic in it. One egg yolk will absorb up to one cup of oil, but you can add less if you don’t need that much mayonnaise. Whisk the oil in drop by drop at first, adding more as you go. It is much easier to whisk when the bowl is steadied. To help hold it still, set it on top of a coiled dish towel. Adding a small amount of water to the egg yolk before you incorporate the oil helps prevent the sauce from separating or “breaking.” If mayonnaise does separate, stop adding oil, but don’t despair. Just crack a fresh egg, separate the yolk into a new bowl, add a little water as before, and slowly whisk in first the broken sauce and then the rest of the oil. Make aïoli half an hour ahead of time, to give the flavors a chance to marry. As with anything made with raw eggs, if you’re not going to serve mayonnaise within an hour, refrigerate it. Aïoli tastes best the day it’s made.